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About $35 per month?

On-premise tin may be cheaper than a long term usage of cloud services. Always do the sums and see if the numbers stack up. Don't just jump to cloud* "because"

* Actually this applies to all the latest vendor fads.

Its usually quick to do the math.

Will you be using the hardware you are renting for more than 3 months*. If so, the hardware is cheaper to buy yourself, unless you were intending on replacing that hardware within that usage period (3 months use over say a 3-5 year period).

*Excluding power etc.

Also keep in mind how much of the time you're actually going to use the hardware. If you're only planning on using it for a 40 hr/wk job, then that machine is being used less than 1/4 of the time. A year of work time (about 2000 hrs/yr) comes out to $2,166. That's still more than the cost of the machine, but it's a lot more reasonable. (Though the computer should probably last a few years, not just one.)

Indeed. And of the use-case is using the Mac to test cross-platform code or a website build, it only be required for an hour a day - or week.

I'm not sure that the claim of 'cheaper to buy a Mac if you use it for 77 days' aids clarity, when that's based on using it 24 hours a day.

"*Excluding power etc."

Power, maintenance, physical space to actually put it, security... quite a few fairly important things are hidden inside that "etc.". The raw cost of just the hardware may only be a few months of rental, but a small business operating out of rented office space that needs to expand their lease to fit an extra desk and PC could find the effective cost being an awful lot more. Same if it requires additional personnel for maintenance, additional security measures against theft, higher insurance premiums, and so on.

If you're big enough that you don't really notice the additional overhead from dropping in an extra PC or two, then three months is a decent enough rule of thumb for considering the cost of the hardware. But depending on your size and circumstances, the incidental costs of those etcs can potentially be many times larger.

Spot on. In big windows organisations, the cost of actually running a Mac can be much larger than the cost of the box. Having to support Macs as well as Windows on-premise is nothing to be sniffed at - not to mention incorporating it into any security/monitoring/patching processes. It's certainly not a flat one-off fee.

The actual sums depend on quite a few factors.

You do need to factor in things like Reserved Instance discounts if locking in for a longer period, egress charges (look at the recent University that fell foul of this)

Also bear in mind that you can set non-Production environments to shut down when not in use to save on AWS/Azure etc. instance charges if on a Pay-As-You-Go tariff.

I am surprised at the number of end-clients not doing this!

My guess is that people who want to use a Mac will want the actual bare-metal at their side, rather than the Mac as a Service online.

Adobe's Creative Cloud has cheered up Photoshop-botherers no end.

Agreed. Perhaps in the future things will change with the new M1 CPU, but for now Macs are almost never used as servers, always as desktops and you can't do video editing etc through the cloud so I don't really see the point of this service. Perhaps Amazon are simply hedging their bets.

Re the cost - isn't that the same for most cloud services? The point isn't to get hardware on the cheap (unless you only need it for days or weeks) , its to not have to bother to set up, maintain and admin it all yourself as salaried employees to do that far exceed the cost of the hardware in the long term.

I imagine it makes sense for some companies during the current situation - it's cheaper to buy your own but what if you've got multiple devs/testers working from home and due to lockdown/social distancing? Renting Macs on the cloud is probably a reasonable short term solution. Buying a Mac for everyone may not make sense and you may not want to send people to an office or data centre to set them all up.

"...I imagine it makes sense for some companies during the current situation - it's cheaper to buy your own but what if you've got multiple devs/testers working from home and due to lockdown/social distancing? Renting Macs on the cloud is probably a reasonable short term solution. Buying a Mac for everyone may not make sense and you may not want to send people to an office or data centre to set them all up..."

Not really. If they're going to be used to the extent that they cost as much as above (but as another poster pointed out, you really want to be using intelligent provisioning of all machines in the cloud to power them off when not in use) then it would make more sense to put them in an office (or even data centre) and provide some means to remote control into them.

Costs can soon spiral if you don't manage your cloudy estate properly - the two things I usually see overlooked are the above power management* but also making good estimates of egress data costs.

*It's been a while since I looked at it but MS's Azure costs calculator used to default to 40 hours a week, and if I recall correctly, also made the assumption that you'd be re-using existing on-premise licenses to further bring the costs down.

I worked for a large retail outfit and had the devil's own time convincing their all-knowing EA that buy Citrix cloud licensing did not provide Azure licenses. Back of the fag-packet costings meant over £400k short.

I should've let the arsehole go ahead and put the order in rather than pulling him out of the hole he'd dug for himself but that kind of overspend at that point in time would've put the whole company at risk.

" an M1-powered Mac Mini with comparable spec costs $1,099." taken from a post below...

that works out to 100 p/month per dev to do his work, for the first year, or if you prefer to spread that cost over two years 50 p/month, cause you know the new M2 chips will be out by then. Resale value of these units will be high too, offsetting the cost of the next gen.

Hopefully your dev is banking a bit more than that?

" an M1-powered Mac Mini with comparable spec costs $1,099."

I don't think that 16GB and 32GB are "comparable" when the likely use is software development.

If there were an M1-powered Mac with 32GB of RAM, we'd have already bought a dozen. But there isn't, and that's quite possibly why Amazon is still using the Intel-powered models.

Yeah, well, you know what we mean: close enough.

C.

> I don't think that 16GB and 32GB are "comparable" when the likely use is software development.

Nor is 16 GB RAM on Intel comparable to 16 GB on Apple's M1, given the unified memory architecture and very fast swap... of course no purchase decision should be made until made until reading the accounts of actual software developers using the M1 series.

" AWS has aimed its Macs at developers who want to test and sign apps developed for Apple devices. "

Provided the daily rate can be used literally for odd days now and then, this is possibly a compelling example of the real benefits of cloud. (They're often hard to find). Testing and signing an Apple app occasionally would not merit the purchase price of a Mac.

Way back before the flood, we used a pay per device (in those days postal) service for programming prototype logic chips - a very similar if clunkier concept. Only later when volume grew was it worth splashing out big bucks for compilers and programmers.

If your systems process more than 1 byte per decade, "the cloud" will be way more expensive and way less reliable.

Fact.

Don't think Azure has virtual or physical Macs - docs suggest they just have ways to bring your own Mac Tin into their development pipelines...

You'd be wrong. Pipelines has Mac agents you can run your build on.

OK misread the docs - in that case looks Azure Macs have been a thing since 2017???